[Event] Inaugural Lecture by Prof. Dorothy Duffy

[external source element is broken] error message: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'to_html' Title: Making Tracks: Modelling Radiation Effects in Materials [external source element is broken] error message: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'to_html' Wednesday 23rd March 2016, 4pm, UCL (Harrie Massey LT) [external source element is broken] error message: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'to_html' The irradiation of materials with neutrons, ions or photons is used to improve properties, fabricate nanoscale devices and dope semiconductors.

However, irradiation can also have catastrophic consequences as it can cause microelectronic devices to fail and it can degrade the properties of materials in nuclear reactors. It is important to understand the fundamental processes that occur when these high energy particles interact with solids, so that we can use radiation effects to our advantage and avoid the serious consequences. Molecular dynamics is a powerful tool for modelling and predicting radiation effects, particularly for scenarios in which the radiation interacts primarily with the atomic nuclei. I will describe how standard molecular dynamics can be enhanced to include the effects of radiation that excites electrons. I will show examples of how the method is used to predict the effects of neutron irradiation in fusion reactors and the response of metals to ultrafast laser irradiation. Irradiating metals with nanosecond laser pulses induces a state of matter, sometimes referred to as warm dense mater, in which the atoms are cold and the electrons are hot. We use our enhanced molecular dynamics method to calculate the structural dynamics of a gold film that is induced by a nanosecond laser pulse, and compare our results with experimental measurements from ultrafast electron diffraction. The excellent agreement between experiment and modelling enables us to describe the picosecond melting processes with full atomistic detail.

Biography:

Dorothy Duffy did her first degree in Physics at Durham University and her PhD at Imperial College on the topic of the structure of glasses. She then went on to hold a joint appointment at Reading University and the Theoretical Physics division at UKAEA Harwell. She took an extended career break following the birth of her two children and returned to academia with the award of a Daphne Jackson fellowship in 1996. The fellowship was followed by a postdoc position at Warwick University. She joined UCL as a senior research associate in 2002 and was appointed to a lectureship in 2005.

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